Re: New subscription-monitoring service from Stanford's HighWire Press

[Xiaorong Zhang <zhang8@llnl.gov>]

Dr. Goodman,

Thank you for sharing this information with the list.  And thank HighWire 
for taking the initiative to create and offer this service to the library 
community.  It doesn't matter if the service still has limitations.  Good 
things don't get better if they didn't exist first.

******************************
Xiaorong Zhang
Technical Information Specialist
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
7000 East Ave, Livermore CA 94551
925-422-8491 Voice
925-424-2921 Fax
zhang8@llnl.gov
*******************************

At 06:42 PM 2/28/2003 -0500, you wrote:
>To Colleagues on the notification list for HighWire Subscription
>changes:
>
>Last year, librarians who administer institutional ejournal subscriptions
>asked if there wasn't some way that we could alert them when a
>subscription lapsed/expired -- i.e., when their patrons lost access -- so
>they didn't face the situation in which it was the patron who discovered
>the problem and left the librarian scrambling to restore lost access.
>
>This sounded easy.  After all, if HighWire could turn off access, surely
>we could tell you when we did so.  It wasn't that easy.  However, we've
>developed some tools that let us do the best we can with the data
>publishers provide to us.  (Some of the limitations of these tools are
>described in the section "Limitations" at the end of this note.)
>
>----Introduction:
>
>We are now making available a service that will alert you when access from
>a particular subscription ends, and in some cases this service will allow
>you to get advance notice weeks in advance of loss of access.
>
>We are particularly anxious to release this capability before the grace
>periods many publishers set this year begin to expire. This is expecially
>important because of the RoweCom debacle, so we wanted to deliver this
>capability rapidly, despite its limitations.
>
>----How to use the new Subscription-Expiration Alert Service:
>
>If you are not the person who administers subscriptions at your
>institution, then you may want to forward this note to that person.
>
>To use this new tool:
>
>- You must be a registered user of the HighWire portal.
>
>- Go to http://highwire.stanford.edu and sign in with your
>   email address and password.  The email address must be one
>   that you use for administering the subscriptions you want to
>   monitor.  [If you haven't registered, do so; it takes a
>   minute.]
>
>- Click on the 'For Institutions' button at the top center of
>   the home page.
>
>- On the 'Information and Services for Institutional Subscribers'
>   page, in the center/red column, look for 'Manage Subscription
>   Expiration'  and click on the bullet point underneath it.
>
>- Fill out the form to indicate your preferences for alerts
>- Click 'Create Alert'
>
>You may also want to click the link to "Review any expired subscriptions
>you administer"
>
>since the new alert system will only tell you about subscriptions that
>expire *after* you sign up.  But this 'Review' link will tell you about
>ones that have already expired.
>
>After you 'Create Alert', you'll receive an overnight email whenever there
>is an expiration to notify you about.
>
>----Limitations of the new service:
>
>As I'm sure librarians know even better than I, the long chain beteen
>library, agent, publisher, fulfillment vendor and HighWire is subject to
>"fragility" shall we say.  Trying to alert you to access problems without
>crying wolf is a challenge. We hope we've struck the right balance:
>
>1) The system can alert you about a subscription expiring, but your access
>to that content may continue.  That is, if your institution has multiple
>subscriptions to a title, one might expire but your patrons will continue
>to get access under the other.
>
>2) You might have intended for a subscription to expire. HighWire can't
>see what you don't *intend* to renew, only that access has changed.
>
>3) We can't alert you in advance of expiration for all subscriptions.
>For many journals, we don't get expiration dates in the data supplied from
>publishers and for these we can't alert in advance; for these we can only
>alert on expiration.  We've made a list of such journals available from
>the sign-up form.
>
>4) You will get a single email from the alerting system any day that it
>detects expirations to inform you of.  The one email may contain multiple
>subscription alerts.  It would delay the release of this product by a few
>weeks to provide one email for each subscription, but testers have told us
>they would like this feature in the future.
>
>5) We haven't provided an interface to allow an administrator to choose to
>receive alerts on some journals but not others.  Many administrators have
>60+ journals, and it seemed asking people to check a lot of boxes, or
>uncheck a lot of boxes, would create a daunting form.  Simpler to give all
>or none.
>
>5) Unfortunately, we can't send alerts in advance of expiration in the
>most critical time of the year for expirations. Publishers don't all send
>us updated subscription information before the end of each calendar year.
>That is, we may not know that your subscription to a journal has been
>renewed until January 1 of the new year.  And so we can't accurately tell
>you **from the data HighWire has** on (for example) December 15th whether
>a subscription has or hasn't been renewed for the next year.
>
>Even with these limitations we thought this new alerting capability was
>better to have available than not, since it provides a way for a librarian
>to know of a problem before patrons will be denied access. We think this
>is an important addition to the set of tools librarians have to ensure
>service continuity in an electronic world, and hope you find it useful.
>
>John Sack, Director
>             HighWire Press, Stanford University
>             Phone: 650-723-0192; fax: 650-725-9335
>             http://highwire.stanford.edu/~sack
>             sack@stanford.edu